Swords of the Legion (Videssos) Read online

  And along with the foreigners were the Videssians themselves: proud, clever, vivid, loud, quick to take offense, and as quick to give it. Minstrels strolled through the surging crowds, singing and accompanying themselves on drums, lutes, or pandouras, which had a more plangent, mournful tone. Marcus, who had no ear for music, ignored them as best he could. Some of the locals were not so kind. “Why don’t you drown that poor cat and have done?” somebody shouted, whereupon the maligned musician broke his lute over the critic’s head. The people around them pulled them apart.

  Shaven-headed priests and monks of Phos moved here and there in their blue robes, some exhorting the faithful to pray to the good god, others, on some mission from temple or monastery, haggling with as much vigor and skill as any secular. Scribes stood behind little portable podiums, each with stylus or quill poised to write for folk who had money but no letters. A juggler cursed a skinny carpenter who had bumped him and made him drop a plate. “And to Skotos’ ice with you,” the other returned. “If you were any good, you would have caught it.” Courtesans of every description and price strutted and pranced, wearing bright, hard smiles. Touts sidled up to strangers, praising this horse or sneering at that.

  Venders, some in stalls, others wanderers themselves, cried their wares: squid, tunny, eels, prawns—as a port, the city ate great quantities of seafood. There was bread from wheat, rye, barley; ripe cheeses; porridge; oranges and lemons from the westlands; olives and olive oil; garlic and onions; fermented fish sauce. Wine was offered, most of it too sweet for Scaurus’ taste, though that did not stop him from drinking it. Spoons, goblets, plates of iron, brass, wood, or solid silver were offered; drugs and potions allegedly medicinal, others allegedly aphrodisiacal; perfumes; icons, amulets, and books of spells. The tribune was cautious even toward small-time wizards here in Videssos, where magic was realer than it had been in Rome. Boots, sandals, tooled-leather belts; hats of straw, leather, linen, cloth-of-gold; and scores more whose yells Marcus could not catch because they drowned each other out.

  A shout like the roar of a god came from the Amphitheater, the huge oval of limestone and marble that formed the plaza of Palamas’ southern border. A seller of dried figs grinned at Scaurus. “A long shot came in,” he said knowingly.

  “I’d bet you’re right.” The tribune bought a handful of fruit. He was popping them into his mouth one at a time when he nearly ran into an imperial cavalry officer, Provhos Mourtzouphlos.

  Mourtzouphlos lifted an eyebrow; scorn spread across his handsome, aristocratic features. “Enjoying yourself, outlander?” he asked ironically. He brushed long hair back from his forehead and scratched his thickly bearded chin.

  “Yes, thanks,” Marcus answered with as much aplomb as he could muster, but he felt himself flushing under the Videssian’s sardonic eye. Even though he had ten years on the brash young horseman, who was probably not yet thirty, Mourtzouphlos was native-born, which more than canceled the advantage of age. And acting like a barbarian bumpkin in front of him did not help either. Mourtzouphlos was one of the many imperials with a fine contempt for foreigners under any circumstances; that the Roman was a successful captain only made him doubly suspicious to the other.

  “Thorisin tells me we’ll be moving against the Yezda in the Arandos valley after the roads west dry,” the Videssian said, carefully scoring a couple of more points against Scaurus. His casual use of the Emperor’s given name bespoke the renown he had won in the campaign with Gavras against Namdalener invaders around Opsikion in the east, while the tribune toiled unseen in the westlands against the great count Drax and more Namdaleni. And his news was from some council to which the Roman, in disfavor for letting Drax get away in the escape Helvis had devised, had not been invited.

  But Marcus had a comeback ready. “I’m sure we’ll do well against them,” he said. “After all, my legionaries have held the plug of the Arandos at Garsavra the winter long.”

  Mourtzouphlos scowled, not caring to be reminded of that. “Well, yes,” he grudged. “A good day to you, I’m sure.” With a flick of his cloak, he turned on his heel and was gone.

  The tribune smiled at his stiff retreating back. There’s one for you, you arrogant dandy, he thought. Mourtzouphlos’ imitation of the Emperor’s shaggy beard and unkempt hair annoyed Scaurus every time he saw him. Thorisin’s carelessness about such things was part of a genuine dislike for formality, elegance, or ceremony of any sort. With the cavalryman it was pure pose, to curry favor with his master. That cape he had flourished was thick maroon samite trimmed in ermine, while he wore a belt of gold links and spurred jackboots whose leather was soft and supple enough for gloves.

  When Marcus came on a vender with a tray of smoked sardines, he bought several of those and ate them, too, hoping Mourtzouphlos was watching.

  Rather apprehensively, the tribune broke the sky-blue wax seal on the little roll of parchment. The note inside was in a thin, spidery hand that he knew at once, though he had not seen it for a couple of years: “I should be honored if you would attend me at my residence tomorrow afternoon.” With that seal and that script, the signature was hardly necessary: “Balsamon, ecumenical Patriarch of the Videssians.”

  “What does he want?” Scaurus muttered. He came up with no good answer. True, he did not follow Phos, which would have been enough to set off almost any ecclesiastic in the Empire. Balsamon, though, was not typical of the breed. A scholar before he was made into a prelate, he brought quite un-Videssian tolerance to the patriarchal office.

  All of which, Marcus thought, leaves me no closer to what he wants with me. The tribune did not flatter himself that the invitation was for the pleasure of his company; the patriarch, he was uneasily aware, was a good deal more clever than he.

  His Stoic training did let him stop worrying about what he could not help; soon enough he would find out. He tucked Balsamon’s summons into his beltpouch.

  The patriarchal residence was by Phos’ High Temple in the northern part of the city, not far from the Neorhesian harbor. It was a fairly modest old stucco building with a domed roof of red tiles. No one would have looked at it twice anywhere in the city; alongside the High Temple’s opulence it was doubly invisible.

  The pine trees set in front of it were twisted with age, but green despite the season. Scaurus always thought of the antiquity of Videssos itself when he saw them. The rest of the shrubbery and the hedgerows to either side had not yet come into leaf and were still brown and bare.

  The tribune knocked on the stout oak door. He heard footsteps inside; a tall, solidly made priest swung the door wide. “Yes? How may I serve you?” he asked, eyeing Marcus’ manifestly foreign figure with curiosity.

  The Roman gave his name and handed the cleric Balsamon’s summons, watched him all but stiffen to attention as he read it. “This way, please,” the fellow said, new respect in his voice. He made a smart about-turn and led the tribune down a hallway filled with ivory figurines, icons to Phos, and other antiquities.

  From his walk, his crisp manner, and the scar that furrowed his shaved pate, Marcus would have given long odds that the other had been a soldier before he became a priest. Likely he served as Thorisin Gavras’ watchdog over Balsamon as well as servant. Any Emperor with an ounce of sense kept an eye on his patriarch; politics and religion mixed inextricably in Videssos.

  The priest tapped at the open door. “What is it, Saborios?” came Balsamon’s reedy voice, an old man’s tenor.

  “The outlander is here to see you, your Sanctity, at your command,” Saborios said, as if reporting to a superior officer.

  “Is he? Well, I’m delighted. We’ll be talking a while, you know, so why don’t you run along and sharpen your spears?” Along with having his guess confirmed, the tribune saw that Balsamon had not changed much—he had baited his last companion the same way.

  But instead of scowling, as Gennadios would have done, Saborios just said, “They’re every one of them gleaming, your Sanctity. Maybe I’ll hone a dagger instea
d.” He nodded to Scaurus. “Go on in.” As the Roman did, the priest shut the door behind him.

  “Can’t get a rise out of that man,” Balsamon grumbled, but he was chuckling, too. “Sit anywhere,” he told the tribune, waving expansively; the order was easier given than obeyed. Scrolls, codices, and writing tablets lined every wall of his study and were stacked in untidy piles on the battered couch the patriarch was using, on several tables, and on both the elderly chairs in the room.

  Trying not to disturb the order they were in—if there was any—Marcus moved a stack of books from one of the chairs to the stone floor and sat down. The chair gave an alarming groan under his weight, but held.

  “Wine?” Balsamon asked.

  “Please.”

  With a grunt of effort, Balsamon rose from the low couch, uncorked the bottle, and rummaged through the chaos around him for a couple of cups. Seen from behind, the fat old gray-beard in his shabby blue robe—a good deal less splendid than Saborios’, to say nothing of less clean—looked more like a retired cook than a prelate.

  But when he turned round to hand Scaurus his wine—the cup was chipped—there was no mistaking the force of character stamped on his engagingly ugly features. When one looked at his eyes, the pug nose and wide, plump cheeks were forgotten. Wisdom dwelt in this man, try though he sometimes did to disguise it with a quirk of bushy, still-black brows.

  Under his eyes, though, were dark pouches of puffy flesh; his skin was pale, with a faint sheen of sweat on his high forehead. “Are you well?” Marcus said in some alarm.

  “You’re still young, to ask that question,” the patriarch said. “When a man reaches my age, either he is well or he is dead.” But his droll smile could not hide the relief with which he sank back onto the couch.

  He raised his hands above his head, quickly spoke his faith’s creed: “We bless thee, Phos, Lord with the right and good mind, by thy grace our protector, watchful beforehand that the great test of life may be decided in our favor.” Then he spat on the floor in rejection of the good god’s foe Skotos. The Videssian formula over food or drink completed, he drained his cup. “Drink;” he urged the Roman.

  He cocked an eyebrow when Marcus failed to go through the ritual. “Heathen,” he said. In most priests’ mouths, it would have been a word to start a pogrom; from Balsamon it was simply a label, and perhaps a way to get a sly dig in at the tribune.

  Of its kind, the wine was good, though as usual Scaurus longed for something less cloying. He beat Balsamon to his feet and poured a second cup for both of them. The patriarch nodded and tossed it down; settling cautiously back into his seat, Marcus worked at his more slowly.

  Balsamon was studying him hard enough to make him fidget. Age might have left the patriarch’s eyes red-tracked with veins, but they were none the less piercing for that. He was one of the few people who gave the tribune the uncomfortable feeling that they could read his thoughts. “How can I help your Sanctity?” he asked, attempting briskness.

  “I’m not your Sanctity, as we both know,” the patriarch retorted, but again no fanatic’s zeal was in his voice. When he spoke again, it was with what sounded like real admiration. “You don’t say a lot, do you? We Videssians talk too bloody much.”

  “What would you have me say?”

  “ ‘What would you have me say?’ ” Balsamon mimicked. His laugh set his soft paunch quivering. “You sit there like a natural-born innocent, and anyone who hadn’t seen you in action would take you for just another blond barbarian to be fooled like a Haloga. Yet somehow you prosper. This silence must be a useful tool.”

  Without a word, Marcus spread his hands and shrugged. Balsamon laughed harder; he had a good laugh, one that invited everyone who heard it to share the joke. The tribune found himself smiling in response to it. But when he said, “Truly, I don’t call this past winter prospering,” his smile slipped.

  “Some ways, no,” the patriarch said. “We’re none of us perfect, nor lucky all the time either. But some ways …” He paused, scratching his chin. His voice was musing as he went on. “What do you suppose she sees in you, anyway?”

  It was a good thing Marcus’ cup was on the arm of his chair; had it been in his hand, he would have dropped it. “She?” he echoed, hoping he only sounded foolish and not frightened.

  “Alypia Gavra, of course. Why did you think I sent for you?” Balsamon said matter-of-factly. Then he saw Scaurus’ face, and concern replaced the amusement on his own. “I didn’t mean to make you go so white. Finish your wine, get some wind back in your sails. She asked me to ask you here.”

  Mechanically, the tribune drank. Too much was happening too fast, alarm and relief jangling together like discordant lute strings. “I think you’d best tell me more,” he said. Another fear was in there, too; had she had enough of him, and tried to pick an impersonal way to let him know?

  He straightened in his chair. No—were it that, Alypia had the decency, and the courage, to tell him to his face. His memories were whispering to him; that was all. Having been abandoned by one woman he had trusted and loved, it was hard to be sure of another.

  The twinkle was back in Balsamon’s eyes, a good sign. He said blandly, “She said you might be interested to learn that she had scheduled an afternoon appointment with me three days from now, to pick my brains for what I recall of Ioannakis III, the poor fool who was Avtokrator for a couple of unhappy years before Strobilos Sphrantzes.”

  “And so?” Alypia had been working on her history long before the Romans came to Videssos.

  “Why, only that if she happened to go someplace else when she was supposed to be here, in my senility and decrepitude I don’t think I’d know the difference, and I’d babble on about Ioannakis all the same.”

  The tribune’s jaw fell; amazed gladness shouted in him. Balsamon watched, all innocence. “I must say this senility and decrepitude of yours are moderately hard to see,” Marcus said.

  Did one of the patriarch’s eyelids dip? “Oh, they come and go. For instance, I suspect I shan’t remember much of this little talk of ours tomorrow. Sad, is it not?”

  “A pity,” Scaurus agreed gravely.

  Then Balsamon was serious once more, passing an age-spotted hand in front of his face. “You had better deserve her and the risk she runs for your sake.” He looked the Roman up and down. “You just may. I hope you do, for your sake as well as hers. She always was a good judge of such things, but with what she suffered she cannot afford to be wrong.”

  Marcus nodded, biting his lip. After Alypia’s father—Thorisin’s older brother Mavrikios—was killed at Maragha, young Ortaias Sphrantzes had claimed the throne and gone through the forms of marriage with her to help cement his place. But Ortaias’ uncle Vardanes was the true power in that brief, unhappy reign and took her from his nephew as a plaything. The tribune’s hands tightened into fists whenever he thought of those months. He said, “That once, I wished I were a Yezda, to give Vardanes the requital he deserved.”

  Balsamon’s mobile features grew grave as he studied Scaurus. “You’ll do, I think.” He stayed somber. “You hazard yourself in this, too,” he said. The tribune began a shrug, but Balsamon’s eyes held him still. “If you persist, greater danger will spring from it than any you have ever known, and only Phos can guess if you will win free in the end.”

  The patriarch’s gaze seemed to pierce the tribune; his voice went slow and deep. Marcus felt the hair prickle on his arms and at the nape of his neck. Videssian priests had strange abilities, many of them—healing and all sorts of magery. The Roman had never thought Balsamon more than an uncommonly wise and clever man, but suddenly he was not so sure. His words sounded like foretelling, not mere warning.

  “What else do you see?” Marcus demanded harshly.

  The patriarch jerked as if stung. The uncanny concentration faded from his face. “Eh? Nothing,” he said in his normal voice, and Scaurus cursed his own abruptness.

  After that, the talk turned to inconsequential things. M
arcus found himself forgetting to be annoyed that he had not learned more. Balsamon was an endlessly absorbing talker, whether dissecting another priest’s foibles, discoursing on his collection of ivory figurines from Makuran—“Another reason to hate the Yezda. Not only are they robbers and murderous Skotos-lovers, but they’ve cut off trade since they began infesting the place.” And he swelled up in what looked like righteous wrath—or laughing at himself.

  He picked at a bit of dried eggyolk on the threadbare sleeve of his robe, commenting, “You see, there is a point to my untidiness after all. Had I been wearing that—” He pointed to a surplice of cloth-of-gold and blue silk, ornamented with rows of gleaming seed pearls. “—when I was at breakfast the other day, I might have been liable to excommunication for soiling it.”

  “Another reason for Zemarkhos,” Scaurus said. The fanatic priest, holding Amorion in the westlands in defiance of Yezda and Empire alike, had hurled anathemas at Balsamon and Thorisin both for refusing to acclaim his pogrom against the Vaspurakaners driven into his territory by Yezda raiders—their crime was not worshiping Phos the same way the Videssians did.

  “Don’t twit me over that one,” Balsamon said, wincing. “The man is a wolf in priest’s clothing, and a rabid wolf at that. I tried to persuade the local synod that chose him to reconsider, but they would not. ‘Unwarranted interference from the capital,’ they called it. He reminds me of the tailor’s cat that fell into a vat of blue dye. The mice thought he’d become a monk and given up eating meat.”